The door swung open.
But it was not Professor David Koenig who stood there, holding the door wide to admit them. It was Jenny Greenteeth.
“Hello there!” Jenny said happily. “Don’t just stand there in the snow. Come in. There’s cocoa on, and whiskey for those that will have it despite the hour. If you behave, there are some ladyfingers in the cupboard as well.”
Beyond her was a tall man with a lanky frame, his pants too high on his waist, wisps of white hair on his head and bifocals propped on the end of his nose that made it seem as though he was scrutinizing everything. And perhaps he was.
Kitsune laughed. It seemed the most beautiful sound Oliver had ever heard. “Jenny,” she said happily, and she stepped over the threshold and into the arms of the girl with the matted, filthy, river-bottom hair and the pale green flesh.
“Come here, Kit. Glad to see you in one piece,” Jenny said.
They all went through the door. Oliver was last, allowing the Borderkind to savor their reunion.
“Her?” Gong Gong snapped. “What about you? I saw the Kirata take you down with my own eyes. You were dead, pond scum.”
When he poked Jenny with a sharp talon, it was obvious he was taller than before, at least half again as high, and there were coils in his body like those of a snake. Oliver was unnerved by this change, and by the way the tip of his tail seemed to track in the air like the stinger on a scorpion, as though it might strike.
Jenny laughed at him. “You give me the sweetest nicknames, love.”
Kitsune broke their embrace. “Truly, my friend. We thought you dead.”
“How did you manage—” Blue Jay began.
“Better than them have tried,” Jenny Greenteeth said. And there was something insidious about the cast of her face then, and the set of her jaw. “You keep hearing premature reports of me cashing it in, but it’s wishful thinking. I’ve a pretty face, don’t I? It makes them forget how dangerous my sort can be. Took me hours to wash the blood of those soddin’ arrogant kittens off.”
They went on like that for a while, but Oliver was no longer listening. He was pleased Jenny was safe and that she’d made her way to Canna Island. The Mazikeen had discovered the professor’s location before the Hunters had attacked, so there was no mystery as to how she’d beaten them here. She’d known where to look, and didn’t have to worry about bringing a human along for the trip.
But now the journey was over. Oliver had reached his destination.
“You’re Professor Koenig?” he asked, moving around the gathered Borderkind and into the cottage, where a fire burned in the hearth and the man stood with an unlit pipe clutched in the fingers of his left hand. “David Koenig?”
The professor nodded. “I am. Which would make you Mr. Bascombe. Jenny’s told me of your odyssey, sir. I am sorry to hear of it.”
Oliver’s heart thundered in his chest. Until this very moment some part of him had not believed that Professor Koenig had ever existed, or that if he did they would find him still alive.
“Then . . . it’s true?” he said with a slow nod. “The story about you is true?”
The old man smiled and turned to set his pipe on a rack above the fireplace. “If you mean the tale of my journey through the Veil, it is indeed. I confess I don’t believe I am the only trespasser to escape execution. Merely the only one in recent memory . . . and certainly the only one still alive today.”
Gong Gong was warming himself by the fire, snout nearly close enough to the flames that at any moment his beard might alight. Blue Jay and Kitsune were talking quietly but grimly with Jenny Greenteeth. Oliver was aware of all of them, and yet for a moment the rest of the world seemed to slip away and it was just Professor Koenig and himself.
He stepped nearer to the man, melting snow dripping from his coat and hair. “With so many Borderkind, I knew there had to have been others who’ve brought people across with them. But I don’t understand. Why is it that every one of them has been executed except for you?”
“You must understand, Mr. Bascombe,” the professor said. “It is a rarity for any of the Borderkind to break the law like this, and so ever more rare for the Intruder to be allowed to live. I believe before my good fortune it had been over a century since the last trespasser was spared. It’s quite a story, really. I was a folklorist, you see, and working on a study of Eastern European legend.”
As the old man rambled, Oliver cast his mind back to that night in the midst of the blizzard when Frost had slid through the window of his mother’s parlor, wounded and hunted. The memory of that moment when they had careened off the bluff overlooking the ocean with the Falconer in pursuit was seared into his mind. The moment he had pierced the Veil for the first time. He thought of his father, murdered and defiled, of the Sandman, of Julianna, and especially of Collette, out there somewhere beyond Canna Island, beyond the Veil.
“I’m sorry, Professor,” he said, sadly. “Really. I’d give anything to be able to sit and have tea and hear the whole story. If I’m as fortunate as you’ve been, I swear I’ll come back one day soon and we’ll hear each other’s stories, the good and the bad. But I’m in danger. We’re all, all of us—” and he spread his arms to indicate the Borderkind “— in danger. My companions have shared the road with me, helped keep me alive, but they have other troubles to tend to. I owe it to them not to waste a moment.”
A sad smile touched the old man’s features. “I understand. It’s only that it has been so very long since there was anyone I could speak with about all of this. It isn’t easy to have your wildest dreams come true, and not be able to share that truth with anyone.”
Oliver glanced at the others, who had interrupted their conversation to listen to the two men converse. Kitsune smiled at him, but Blue Jay seemed troubled, a dangerous glint in his eye. Oliver forced himself to ignore it. He was going as fast as he could, after all. What more did the trickster want?
“Trust me. I can imagine,” he said, ignoring Blue Jay. “I always believed in magic, but I always wanted . . . I don’t know what.”
“Proof,” Gong Gong growled. “It’s what they all want, humans. Proof.”
Kitsune stepped nearer the professor and the old man’s eyes lit up as he regarded her, though whether it was due to her beauty or the almost tangible feeling of magic that surrounded her, he could not be certain.
“Professor . . . David,” she said, “we really cannot stay. Death pursues us all. An execution order has been sworn out on Oliver. Please, sir, you must tell him how it is that you were granted clemency, and the order for your own execution lifted.”
The cottage had grown warm with the cluster of bodies inside and the blaze in the hearth, the fire crackling and dancing. Blue Jay moved beside Gong Gong and Jenny between Kitsune and the professor, so that they formed a kind of circle. The center of attention, David Koenig smiled sheepishly.
“I wish there was a better story, or some trick to it. But truly, I wasn’t that clever. I simply asked.”
Oliver gaped at him. “I don’t understand.”
The professor shrugged, almost apologetic. “Oh, to be sure, it was no mean feat staying alive long enough to make my appeal to the kings. But I managed. I put myself at their mercy and pleaded for one year to prove myself worthy of their confidence. They granted me that year, and I made the best of it, working with the advisors to both kingdoms, letting them get to know me.”
He gestured to a sword that had been mounted above the fireplace. At first glance it had looked decorative, but now Oliver saw that the grip was worn and the scabbard scraped and dented.
“Hunyadi, King of Euphrasia, gave me the very sword he had used as a young commander, as a gesture of good faith, you understand.”
Oliver stared at the sword and then at Professor Koenig, and all of the hope that had been flickering in his heart was nearly extinguished. Koenig was spared because of who he was, and what he had proven to be. But what was Oliver? A lawyer, a young man who had not only not fulfilled the dreams he’d had as a boy, but never truly reached for them. How could he expect to convince the men who sat on the thrones of the Two Kingdoms to spare his life?
“Oliver?” Kitsune said, studying him with obvious concern.
He smiled softly and thanked the old man.
“We have a boat waiting to take us back to the mainland, Professor,” Blue Jay said. “We ought to start back.”
“Of course, of course,” Koenig said, but the melancholy in his eyes was haunting. He looked down at Gong Gong. “I would have liked to have heard more about the troubles you are all facing. If I could be of any help, you would only have to tell me. The Borderkind have been my only contact through the Veil for decades.”
“Maybe we’ll come back, old man,” the dragon said, eyes narrowing to slits, sparks jumping from them in the shadows cast by the fire.
The professor looked at Kitsune and Blue Jay and then at Jenny. There was kindness and gratitude in his eyes as he began to speak.
The door blew open, the power of the storm tearing the dead bolt from the wood. It crashed against the wall and the snow howled in, a tumult of icy wind and blinding whiteness that seemed to suck much of the light from within the cottage, dimming the gas lamp and withering the flames in the hearth.
Frost came through the doorway as though riding the wind, fingers elongated into twelve-inch knives of ice, features lengthened and thinned as though parts of him had been carved away. Trailers of mist plumed from his eyes. He stopped, crouched as though he meant to lunge, and then thrust out one hand, twisting the storm winds so that they tugged on the door and then blew it shut, cracking the wooden frame.
“What in the name of God?” the professor cried.
The winter man spun, madness in his eyes. “The Hunters have come! How they tracked us I do not know, but they are here!”
Dark shapes moved past the windows out in the storm.
Jenny Greenteeth laughed softly. “Well, no need for the bait anymore.”
She thrust out a hand, wrapped long fingers around Professor Koenig’s throat, and twisted. The crack of bone echoed off the stones of the hearth and Jenny let the old man crumple to the wood floor, a scarecrow off his post. His arms sprawled out across the dusting of powder Frost’s arrival had spread over the floor, a grotesque snow angel.
CHAPTER 19
O
liver shouted, refusing to accept what he’d seen. He started for Jenny, but a powerful hand clamped on his shoulder and he smelled sulfur. Spinning, he let out another shout. The Black Dragon of Storms had grown, his lithe body now at least eight feet in height, massive snout drooping, long wisps of gray beard draping his chest. The lightning that sparked in his eyes brought thunder from somewhere deep inside of him.
In that moment, Oliver thought he was dead, that Gong Gong had also betrayed them.
“Unarmed, foolish friend,” the dragon snarled.
“Jen?” Kitsune said, her voice raw with pain. Her jade eyes seemed impossibly pale. “You are with them? The Hunters?”
“With them? I’m one of them, Kit. Bloody hell, listen to you! You were always a romantic. Life full of drama, right, love? Did you honestly think I’d been hunted so many times . . . that the soddin’ Manticore came after me . . . and I survived? You stupid twat. No one’s that lucky.”
Oliver saw the way her words cut Kitsune, and he winced.
Blue Jay did more than wince. He twisted round with such speed that he was nearly impossible to follow. There was a ripple in the room as though he swung something at Jenny that sliced the air, a blue-tinted wing that whipped toward her. It might have been real and physical. He was a shape-shifter. But Oliver thought perhaps it was a spell. Magic. The power of the trickster. Blue Jay spun and whatever that blue wing was, it knocked Jenny to the floor, splitting the green flesh on her arm where she’d been struck and snapping bones.
Kitsune was there beside her before Jenny Greenteeth could blink or cry out in pain. The fox-woman was only fox now, but in some animal growl she spoke, and Oliver thought he could make out a single word.
“Bitch.”
The fox tore out Jenny’s throat, and algae-green blood pumped onto the floor.
As the fox began to whine with sorrow, glass shattered and a Kirata came crashing through a window. Two more followed, and chaos erupted. The tiger-men had eyes that glowed bright orange and thick stringers of drool ran from their black lips as they opened their jaws wide in a roar. One dropped to all fours and leaped at Gong Gong. Blue Jay transformed into a bird and darted at its face, even as Frost stepped into the path of the second Kirata.
The third Hunter was a blur of orange and black, fur rippling with muscle as it careened across the cottage at Oliver. From the pool of blood around Jenny Greenteeth’s corpse, Kitsune lunged, but only caught it with one paw, barely scratching the beast.
Oliver’s hands were empty and there was no time to find a weapon. He was paralyzed by the numbing certainty of his own impending death, could practically feel its claws in him, tearing at his chest and abdomen, digging in for tender organs.
